Duke Hamilton is Dead!: A Story of Aristocratic Life and Death in Stuart Britain - Softcover

Stater, Victor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809040352 ISBN 13: 9780809040353

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 2000

Synopsis

Politics and society in an aristocratic world--as seen in the dramatic story of a notorious duel.

On the morning of November 15, 1712, two of Britain's most important peers, the fourth Baron Mohun and the fourth Duke of Hamilton, met in Hyde Park. In a flurry of brutal swordplay that lasted perhaps two minutes, both fell mortally wounded. For months afterward, the kingdom was in a uproar, for the duel had occurred at a moment of grave political crisis. Whigs and Tories, increasingly desperate over the future as Queen Anne neared death, hurled charges of political murder and treasonous plotting against one another. Charge and countercharge filled the press as the social and moral crises mounted.

Using the famous Mohun-Hamilton duel as a focal point, Victor Stater re-creates the desperate aristocratic world of late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Britain. Mohun and Hamilton stood at opposite ends of a bitterly divided political spectrum, but politics was not the only cause of their quarrel. A decade-long battle over a disputed inheritance was a crucial element, and Stater shows how, amid the luxury and ostentation of the aristocratic lifestyle, something very like moral anarchy reigned. The result is a stunning narrative of life and death in a tumultuous time, an era in which incivility and moral turpitude ruled beneath a thin veneer of aristocratic manners.

About this title

About the Author

Victor Stater is a professor of history at Louisiana State University and the author of Noble Government. He lives in Baton Rouge.

From Kirkus Reviews

In a vividly evocative account, Stater (History/Louisiana State Univ.) weaves social and political history into a plot that reads like a Restoration-era episode of Dallas. By the late 17th century the British nobilitys reliance on land-based wealth made them poorer than the new mercantile classes of the emerging British Empire, which compelled many lords to incur ruinous debts to maintain their grand lifestyles. Against this economic backdrop, Stater draws a picture of ubiquitous immorality and violence, typified by the nasty and brutish lives of two men: Charles, the fourth Baron Mohun (16771712), and James, Duke of Hamilton (16581712). Though a prodigious worker in matters of state, Mohun, who was eventually tried for murder twice by the House of Lords, spent most of his life tippling, brawling, and whoring. Hamilton, a Scottish peer who championed Scottish independence, landed twice in the Tower of London for his connections to the Catholic Stuarts and played a deceitful double game for years with the court of the exiled Catholic pretender that amounted to treason. Stater focuses on one particularly fateful piece of intrigue, the bitter decade-long legal battle between Mohun and Hamilton over title to Gawsworth, a valuable English country estate, which had been obtained by Mohun through a monstrous pattern of fraud and perjury, and which Hamilton claimed through his marriage of convenience. The machinations of a rapist and profligate, George MacCartney, whose appointment as governor of Jamaica was blocked by Hamilton, exacerbated the tensions between the two men. In 1712, the Gawsworth lawsuits and the two lords' deepening political enmityMohun and fellow Whigs like the Duke of Marlborough feared that Hamilton's suspected connections with the pretender could result in Catholic restorationled to a mutually fatal encounter on Hyde Park's dueling ground. A vivid, if often ugly, snapshot of a social class under siege in a time of tumultuous change. Well researched and thoughtful. (b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0809040352
• ISBN 13: 9780809040353
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288